The deadline for UK applicants to order tickets for the London 2012 Olympics was supposed to pass at midnight last night (26 April) but such was the overwhelming demand for tickets that the organisers were forced to extend the deadline by an extra hour to accommodate the surge in visits to the official ticket website.

Monitoring traffic to the London 2012 Tickets website, we saw that visits increased by 146% in a single day. Traffic increased eight fold over the last week as the demand to apply for Olympic tickets built to a crescendo on Tuesday.

As a result of the increased traffic to the website, London 2012 Tickets became the 29th most visited website in the UK on 26 April 2011. Last week the website wasn’t even in the top 500 most visited websites. Just focusing on the websites included in our Ticketing category, London 2012 Tickets accounted for 67% of all visits to the category, 13 times more traffic than third placed (and usually category leading) Ticketmaster UK.

When demand was at its peak for tickets, the main London 2012 ticketing site struggled to cope with the volume of visits. Many visitors were frustrated when they couldn’t access the main website, which resulted in the FAQ Answers page being the second most visited website in the category.
With so many sporting spectacles to see, there were no doubt some tough choices to be made regarding which tickets to apply for. Looking at the sporting search terms driving traffic to the London 2012 Tickets website, it is amazing to see the niche sports that UK Internet users were searching for and the absence of some of the Olympics’ most famous events.

From the above list, for example, there is a marked absence of searches for the 100m sprint. This may be because visitors to the ticketing website already knew what event they wanted to apply for, and therefore used a navigational search term to the London 2012 site, or it may be because they knew some events would be heavily oversubscribed, and instead were looking for different events they might have a better chance of securing tickets for.
Either way, gymnastics emerges as the number one event that people were searching for when they were looking for Olympic tickets. In particular, rhythmic gymnastics proved especially popular. Interestingly the top two athlete search terms that were driving traffic to the ticket site were Tom Daley and Jessica Ennis. These two have become icons of the 2012 Olympics, and so it is perhaps not surprising that diving and pentathlon (their respective disciplines) are among the top sports people wanted tickets for.
Look out for more Olympic updates on the blog and on Twitter.